Feminist theology and spirituality are often seen as claiming an
immanent understanding of the divine. This is most typical of those who
see themselves as worshiping a "goddess" or female-imaged
deity. "She is in us and in all things" is the common view of
the goddess. But Christian feminists also often lean toward the immanent
in their understandings of an inclusive deity.

This emphasis on immanence is also being used as a key charge
against feminist theology by the conservative heresyhunters in the
churches. In their view the authentic biblical God is transcendent and
masculine, and so any immanent and feminine conceptions of deity are
ipso facto not Christian. Therefore, feminist theology, even when it
claims the Christian tradition, is to be defined as post-Christian, even
anti-Christian.

I would like to suggest that what is going on here is a fundamental
confusion about the theological meaning of immanence and transcendence
shared by both feminists and antifeminists that allows feminist thought
to be caught in the underside of the same dualisms that it seeks to
oppose in its emphasis on the immanence of God. Basically what feminists
seek in claiming the immanence of God is an understanding of the divine
as holistic, a God who is not seen as mind against body, spirit against
matter, but who is the source of all life and reality in its fullness.
They also seek a liberating God who can free us from patriarchy.

I would suggest that in order to reach out to such a holistic and
liberating understanding of the divine, we need to break free of the
mind-body, transcendence-immanence, outside-inside dualisms and also the
implied identification of masculinity with the transcendent and
femininity with the immanent sides of this polarity. The transcendence
of God has nothing to do with being the external-mind-masculine side,
nor does immanence have to do with being the inside-bodily-feminine side
of these dualisms.

Rather, God's transcendence means God's radical freedom
from all human systems of sin and lies, and God's immanence means
God's liberating presence to us. These two are ultimately the same;
that is, God is liberating as the one who is radically free from our
systems of sin.

The god who is the apex and arche of systems of domination, who is
seen as creating such systems and standing as their founding principle
is, by definition, not the transcendent God but an idol of human systems
of sin and lies. This means that the patriarchal god, the god who is
masculine-mind-externality, by excluding the feminine-body-internality,
lacks authentic transcendence. Such a god is the creature of human
ideologies and systems of power that justify the dominance of men over
women, the powerful over the powerless.

Women and oppressed people must reject this god of false
transcendence, but they are not helped by simply embracing the underside
of these same dualisms. Such immanence is dangerous for victims because,
by implication, it naturalizes the systems of domination and sacralizes
them as the work and will of God. Rather what victimized people and all
of us need is the God who can free us from the systems of sin and their
sacralizing ideologies.

Perhaps, as feminist theologian Rita Gross declared in a paper
given at the recent American Academy of Religion conference in
Washington, we should think of transcendence and immanence as, first of
all, characteristics of religious experience rather than definitions of
God.

Transcendence as religious experience means that experience of
exaltation that enables us to soar beyond the trivial and oppressive
patterns of daily life and touch transforming and liberating
alternatives. Those who are directed to locate themselves solely in
trivial and oppressive realms as their primary sphere of life
desperately need experiences of transcendence.

What are the experiences of transcendence? These can come in many
forms: experiences of beauty in nature, art and music that lift us
beyond the ordinary; and jarring experiences of social dissonance that
shake us out of the assumption that such social patterns are normal.
They can also be the cultivated experiences of prayer and attentive
social relationships. Such experiences are both grace or unexpected
happenings and call for our appropriation of them and reflection upon
their meaning.

Gross suggested that only when we have engaged in a long and
profound journey of transcending religious experience and have sorted
out in a mature way what is authentic and life-giving from what is
deluding and violent, only then can we risk the experiences of immanence
- that is, the experiences of the divine as the sacred presence of daily
life in and around us. Premature immanence is dangerous to women, to all
of us, because it risks sacralizing the oppressive patterns from which
we need to be freed.

The understanding of God in feminist theology, in liberation
theologies, must be radically transcendent, in the sense of being One
who is radically free and the source of freedom from all systems of sin
and lies.

Only when we are deeply in touch with the transcendent God of
freedom can we also know God as the One who is more present to us than
we are to ourselves, the One who is the source of all life and newness
of life in and around and under all things. This is the One who truly
creates and redeems the world.

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